It's the high season for amusement-park pleasures — even, it seems, on stage. Two rides worth the price of their tickets are cheerily whipping around with expert timing.

The Avenue Theater is presenting the regional premiere of Daniel Jenkins and Robert Stanton's crazed comedy "Love Child."

At CU-Boulder's University Theatre, Michael Frayn's 1982 farce-times-two "Noises Off" is getting a ridiculously sublime revival as part of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's summer offerings. What a fizzy, ginned-up tonic it is to the fest's beautifully wrought, aptly severe "Richard III."

Should we consider overheated comedies the homeopathic remedy for our unseasonable heat? Perhaps. Because there's little by way of cool, calm and collected in either of these play-within-a-play romps. Doors bang. Characters slip on the equivalent of banana peels. Romantic entanglements are misunderstood, and a penchant for mixed-up homonyms prevails.

As if to prove the adage "dying is easy, comedy is hard," the two actors in "Love Child" slay the audience with humor by taking on 26 characters. Not only do Steven J. Burge and Damon Guerrasio inhabit a number of peculiar, lively, chattering personalities, they provide a serious amount of tech assistance when it comes to sound effects.

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Joel (Burge) is an underemployed actor and artistic director of a very-off Broadway theater company that is staging a show he's long dreamt of producing. "Love Child" is the name of the update on Euripides' play "Ion," about an orphan and his complicated parentage.

While Joel readies his actors, including Guerrasio's leading man, his agent, Esther (Burge), and her sister, Kay (Guerrasio), take seats near the front of the stage. They are a yammering couple from the old school.

Directed by Nick Sugar, Burge and Guerrasio are nimble of tongue and gifted with physical shtick. As fleet as the actors are, there are still occasions when, as the play hurtles toward revelations befitting daytime soaps, the audience is likely to be befuddled.

The set is spare, composed of six chairs. Once the dazzling duo plunge into the work, one gets the sense any more production elements would have overcrowded things.

Some clever "Noises"

"Noises Off" follows the mounting of a British farce called "Nothing On." And its terrific cast — "Noises Off's" that is — is no less game for tortuous entendres and the demands of slapstick than the stars of "Love Child."

Jamie Ann Romero and Geoffrey Kent, two of the zany ensemble of Michael Frayn's farce-within-a-farce "Noises Off." (Glenn Asakawa, Provided by University of Colorado)

They do, however, have the benefit of Bruce Bergner's set, which revolves in order to show both the on-stage performance and backstage dramas unfolding as the cheesy farce has its dress rehearsal and then a couple of bedeviled performances.

"Nothing On" is an atrocious bit of theatrical business, starring Dotty Otley as Mrs. Clackett, housekeeper for Philip and Flavia Brent, who are in Spain — or "Spine," as Mrs. Clackett tells someone on the phone. Her accent is as broad as much of the comedy.

As the curtain opens on "Nothing On," Mrs. Clackett is hoping to prop up her feet and watch a royal display of hats and circumstance on the telly with a plate of sardines on her lap. No such luck.

Instead, real estate agent Roger, portrayed by Garry Lejeune, arrives with his hook-up Brooke. And the house's owners Philip and Flavia, portrayed by the farce-within-the-farce's most likeable pair, Frederick Fellowes and Belinda Blair, sneak back into their home while trying to avoid the tax man.

So begins the on-stage near-misses, the opened and slammed door gags, the abrupt entrances and bumbled exits.

For those who have seen the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's "Twelfth Night" (co-produced with the Arvada Center), the faces here will look familiar. And one can't but wonder how these actors are keeping the two comedies, which overlap a for a spell, straight. In an incidental but timely nod to the Shakespeare, "Nothing On" director Lloyd Dallas takes his leave for part of the run for a production of "Richard III."

Backstage, the actors of "Nothing On" have their own dramas. Each character has some tic that makes this comedy, directed by Lynne Collins, tock with Swiss-watch precision.

Leslie O'Carroll's Dotty is a bit, well, dotty. While she helped produce the play, "Nothing On" can hardly be considered a vanity project. She's having too hard a time remembering her cues for that. The audience recalls her stage directions sooner than she does.

Gary (Geoffrey Kent) is prone to the unfinished thought. Freddy Fellowes has nosebleeds and wants too sincerely to know his character's motivation. Selsdon Mowbray (Jim Hunt) is the tippling thespian everyone is trying to keep away from the sauce.

Rachel Fowler does a lovely job of making Belinda Blair's attempts to be gently on top of things touching as she blows kisses and tries to keep her fellow actors in line. Alas, the shenanigans of "Noises Off" happily prove that the only thing to say to all Belinda's genuine efforts at professionalism is "good luck with that."

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